The architect Dimitris Pikionis was born in PPiraeus in 1887 and passed away in Athens on August 1968. He is considered to be one of the most iconic and pneumatic figures, while his autonomous poetic and artistic work is referred to as a basic defender of the greek tradition. He was a complex personality, since he didn’t engage solely with architecture. He was also a poet, a philosopher and an artist.

The period in which he acted and created is characterized by the efforts of the greek creators to form the contemporary greek art and arxhitecture. In the ’20s as well as the ’40s and the ’50s the greek reality shaken by the consequences of two world wars is searching its self-designation through the “return to our roots”.

Particularly, Pikionis is searching for this self-designation in the ancient greek inheritance, which would get reintegrated in the country and in the anonymous folk art, though the European neoclassicism. The researches take place in the context of the spreading of the modern movement, as well as in the wider context of searching for an identity for the newly established greek state, through the references in the Byzantium and the ancient greek tradition. The European romantic movement of the 19^th century is also a factor and an influence on Dimitris Pikionis.

During his life his mind was wandering between the modern and the traditional, the foreign and the greek, the west and the east. Despite the fact that he nearly never used the world “ελληνικότητα”, he searched for that exactly, in a context where he tried to correlate the past with the present time.

The relationship of Pikionis with art, the modern movement, tradition, the natural environment, the east and the ancient greek culture will be examinded through his texts and work, as influences which dictated his architectural course thourgh the years. Next will follow the description and an analysis of the interventions on the hills of Acropolis and Filopappou. They were created in the ’50s when the general demolition kai reconstruction of Athens, and especially the areas around Acropolis, finds Pikionis producing his most important work as well as one of the most important of the greek architecture.